A Friendlier Workplace Pays Big Dividends, Companies Find : Labor: Amenities include child care, gyms and flexible hours. Goals are to cut turnover, absenteeism and tardiness and to boost productivity.

SAN ANTONIO —  What in the workaday world is going on?

Junior executives at British Airways play tiddlywinks and do jigsaw puzzles to learn teamwork and control stress.

At Friday night beer parties around the company pool at the Tandem Corp., engineers and top executives swap ideas.

Wang Laboratories has an open-door policy, allowing anyone to attend any company meeting, and sponsors picnics to foster a sense of family among its 10,000 employees.

General Motors has more than 100 staff psychologists dealing with problems of drugs, alcohol, burnout, depression, obesity, death in the family, divorces, even broken hearts on the assembly line.

At a Honeywell plant in California, employees gathered in the parking lot to hear top executives in wigs and rock-band gear belt out heavy metal to launch a new marketing campaign.

Corporations across the land are trying to make the workplace a friendlier place. The purpose of the corporate “outreach” is not entirely altruistic. The corporations feel a happier work force means less absenteeism, greater productivity, less outlay on medical benefits, labor peace and a better product.

A growing number of Fortune 500 companies are issuing “mission statements” spelling out ethical management practices in dealing with both customers and their work forces.

There’s evidence that it’s paying off. For example, in gratitude for a pay raise and no layoffs during some heavy fiscal weather and a policy of promoting up from the ranks, Delta Air Lines employees chipped in and bought the company a Boeing 767.

At a suggestion from the factory floor, Levi Strauss employees in Fayetteville, Ark., curbed boredom and boosted productivity by teaming up to learn each other’s jobs. Operators did top stitching one day, creasing the next and soon were deciding among themselves what to do on which days. The team idea is spreading to other plants around the world.

To make the workplace “more family friendly,” IBM is building child day-care centers in Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina and Texas, joining Corning Glass, Marriott, Pepsico and a growing number of businesses worried about turnover, absenteeism and tardiness. After all, the U.S. work force now includes more than half the mothers of children under 6 years old.

Like Motorola, Xerox, Cummins Engines and an increasing number of other firms, Levi Strauss is showing a corporate concern for the relationship between work and family. An 18-member task force, including secretaries, managers, sewing machine operators and the chief executive officer, Robert Haas, great-great-grandnephew of the founder of the jeans giant, is studying ways in which the company can help solve family problems that spill over onto the factory floor.

“It used to be that what happened to your employees when they went home at the end of the day was their business,” Haas said, “but today that worker’s sick child is your business, because if she’s worrying about her child and calling in sick when she isn’t, and probably feeling resentful because she had to lie, she isn’t going to be productive.”

Or, as Dana Friedman, co-president of the New York-based Families and Work Institute, puts it: “These days it’s no longer possible for people to leave their personal problems at home, because there is no one at home.”

Here in San Antonio, in a building bigger than the Pentagon set on 286 flowering acres, insurance giant USAA--United Services Automobile Assn.--coddles and encourages its 13,000 employees with tennis courts, lighted softball fields, jogging trails and picnic groves, a lake stocked with trout and perch, a splendidly equipped physical fitness center, subsidized “dump your plump” cafeteria meals and a food takeout service that is a boon for working couples and single parents.

The charming courtyards spaced throughout the 3.1 million square feet of office space come alive at lunchtime with art shows, folk dancers and, at fiesta time, mariachi bands and el mercado , a bustling Mexican market. There is a company store, a well-stocked library and a clinic staffed by nine registered nurses. All employees from vice presidents to leaf rakers are eligible for a complete annual physical checkup at age 50 and over.

To help workers cope with the demands of career and family, USAA has a team of 13 professional counselors, available by dialing extension CALL, who have dealt with problems ranging from temper tantrums at the work station to potential suicides and a recent case of child abuse. Experts are brought in to conduct free “brown bag” seminars during lunch breaks and after hours on a broad spectrum of health and social issues, including buying a house, planning for retirement, handling rebellious teen-agers and caring for an elderly parent.

USAA spends $19 million a year, 2.7% of its budget, on career training to promote from the ranks. About 1,800 employees are enrolled in college courses given in 60 classrooms on the premises by area and local colleges. Those going on to graduate work have their tuition paid, including fees for CPA exams. Many learn right at their desks by calling up a wide variety of self-improvement programs on their computer terminals.

Workers’ ideas are welcome, kept track of in the computer and rewarded at recognition breakfasts with gifts of bicycles, cameras and power tools.

USAA’s four-day, 39-hour work week, introduced in 1971, reduced employee turnover from 44% to the current industry low of less than 7%, and absenteeism from double digits to below 2%.

An aggressive Wellness Committee has brought about a smoke-free environment in or anywhere near the building and is now pushing weight control, blood pressure screening and cancer awareness. Employees get a $50 reduction in health insurance costs for giving up smoking, using seat belts or losing weight, or $150 for all three.

A subsidized van pool transports 1,700 riders a day from distances of up to 60 miles, cutting down the stress and cost of commuting and often eliminating the need for a second car. “Our people arrive more relaxed and ready for work, and it saves us having to build another parking garage,” said Bill Cooney, vice president for support services.

A buying service that began as an economical way of adjusting property claims is available to all employees, taking the hassle out of buying a new car, jewelry or furniture.

“Some very pragmatic people come into this building and they think it’s very lush and plush,” said Robert McDermott, chief executive officer. “They ask why we do this. Why the four-day work week, the fleet of 150 vans, the subsidized food services, the company store and a lot of our other programs? My answer is very simple: People spend more waking hours at work than anything else. So why not make it not only as pleasant as possible but conducive to good effort and output, high morale, courtesy and pride in what they’re going? We try to treat them the way we want them to treat the customers.”

McDermott, a retired Air Force brigadier general with a Harvard MBA, took charge of USAA in 1969 and expanded its owned and managed assets from $200 million to $19 billion, making it a leader in both personnel policy innovations and an advanced computer technology that may soon realize his dream of a “paperless environment in this paper-intense world of insurance.”

From out of sight in the rankings, USAA became the fifth largest automobile insurance company, the sixth largest in homeowners policies, and it diversified into banking, real estate, financial management, travel services and life insurance. Its customer base is mainly active and retired military officers and their dependents, which is why “marble row,” the executive wing on the third floor, is populated with six retired generals and a large assortment of lesser brass versed in leadership and high-tech office weaponry.

USAA already processes more transactions per day--9.7 million--than any single computer facility in the world, as well as being the world’s largest user of IBM image terminals. Despite such job-eliminating automated marvels as three robots to retrieve insurance data tapes and optical storage discs that did away with miles of files, there has never been a layoff.

USAA runs a tight ship, insisting on high performance and a dress code, which chief administrative officer Herb Emanuel, a retired Air Force major general who was deputy chief of staff for personnel, concedes “may be a hangover from the military. But our philosophy is that dressing up makes you feel good about yourself and your job.”

The company’s success in the personnel field is evidenced by the 34,970 applications it received last year for 1,248 available jobs, and the steady procession of economists, business school professors and other CEOs who come to try to fathom how it can afford such benefits during these dark fiscal times while other firms are asking for employee “givebacks.”

For sure, a number of corporate Cassandras are crying enough already or too much in the benefits line, but significant voices in industry insist that treating people better, like partners on a team, is the only way out of the economic doldrums. Unless human resources are tapped to the full, they warn, corporate America will run a poor third to the growing competition from a united Europe, with its economic core in Germany, and a thriving Pacific Rim fanning out from Japan.

“There are subtle changes taking place in demographics and in the value systems people hold,” said management consultant Robert Guest. “Those entering the workplace look at work differently. They question the rigid authority systems of our large-scale bureaucracies. They seek greater freedom to think independently. They want to be involved in decisions that affect them in their jobs. In short, they want a piece of the action.”

With 10 million mothers of preschoolers pursuing careers and more and more couples with school-age children joining the work force, who’s watching the kids these days? More and more, corporate America is assuming the nanny role. On-site child care centers, although costing in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million dollars, are growing in popularity among companies plagued by absenteeism, tardiness and constant staff turnover. Others subsidize off-premises child care and keep tabs on the cost and quality of what is available locally.

“Flex benefits,” pioneered by American Can and now a rising trend in the human resources field, enable workers to decide for themselves how to spend their allocated benefits among medical and dental programs, child and elderly care, more life insurance, even extra vacation time. “Flex hours,” an even newer trend, encourage negotiating a work schedule of coming in early or leaving late to drop off an elderly relative at a day-care center or pick up a child at school.

Companies are increasingly offering counseling to those who admit to a drug problem, and underwriting the costs of treatment and therapy. Salvaging a trained worker has been found to be both economical and humane. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates drug abuse costs the nation’s businesses $60 billion a year in absenteeism, lost productivity, workplace theft and medical costs.

Eight of every 10 companies ranked among Fortune’s 500 have employee assistance programs to provide professional counseling and psychotherapy on a number of personal problems, including drugs and alcohol, divorce, obesity, grief, troubled relationships, child abuse, wife beating and unruly teen-agers. “Freud on the job,” they find, improves performance and fattens the bottom line.

“If someone does something wrong, the knee-jerk reaction is to get rid of them instead of supervisors helping employees to analyze the roots of the problem,” said Loret Carbone, human resources chief of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, a Chicago-based restaurant chain that encourages its 3,500 employees, from waiters to partners, to seek therapy to better understand themselves and each other.

With surveys showing that 65% of the American work force reads below ninth-grade level, companies such as Goodyear, Motorola, Eastman Chemical and Hewlett-Packard have inaugurated literacy training and remedial classes in basic math and science skills to enable their workers to perform in today’s high-tech automated workplace. Banks are teaching tellers how to add and factories must teach workers how to read the instruction manuals before modernizing their machinery.

As a matter of survival in competing against a better-educated Japanese work force, managers encourage workers to take company-financed adult education courses to cope with the high skills and decision-making that replace the single-function assembly line input of yesteryear’s blue-collar laborer.

“In the ‘90s, as never before, people are the key to the performance and competitiveness of American corporations,” said Jerry Jasinowski, president of the National Assn. of Manufacturers.

In the age of robots, mainframe computers and image-processing systems that read the incoming mail, it’s nice to know the boss still needs people around the place.